[Solved] Can Only Type Documents Up To 250 Pages.

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Denv12
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[Solved] Can Only Type Documents Up To 250 Pages.

Post by Denv12 »

Hi. I'm new here. Just trying to find a solution to a problem. Hope you can help.

I have Windows 7. I'm using Openoffice 4.1.6. I use for typing up my own documents.

The problem I'm having is one of my documents is now up to 270 pages. As I keep adding to it it doesnt seem to want to go any further than that. I noticed this today. Is there a setting I need to change? My computer has 931 GB in total. I've used 91.1 GB. I've got 840 GB free space available. so that shouldnt be an issue. Is there anything I've missed? Thank you.

Update:

Just wanted to add some information.

As for ODF,etc, I started using the Rich Text instead of the ODF.
My documents are very quick to load up even the 250 page. I had used another free software but it took about 30 minutes to load up and that was when the there' was around 200 pages.
Last edited by RoryOF on Sat Mar 16, 2019 1:01 pm, edited 4 times in total.
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FJCC
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Re: Can Only Type Documents Up To 250 Pages.

Post by FJCC »

A document of that length should not be a problem. The first thing to check is that you do not have a paragraph that is too long. Select the menu item View → Nonprinting Characters. Do your paragraphs near the end of the document end with a ¶? That character is created with the Enter key. If you are in the habit of using Shift + Enter, your paragraphs will end with a bent arrow. That does not count as the end of a paragraph in OpenOffice and there is a limit on paragraph length.
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Zizi64
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Re: Can Only Type Documents Up To 250 Pages.

Post by Zizi64 »

Here is a standard ODF type sample document (Andrew Pitonyak's new free Starbasic+API macro book for AOO/LO users) with more than 600 pages, and with many - but well optimized(!) - pictures). I can open it without any problem on my Win7x64Prof 8GiB memory PC:
http://www.pitonyak.org/OOME_4_0.odt
Tibor Kovacs, Hungary; LO7.5.8 /Win7-10 x64Prof.
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Denv12
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Re: Can Only Type Documents Up To 250 Pages.

Post by Denv12 »

FJCC wrote:A document of that length should not be a problem. The first thing to check is that you do not have a paragraph that is too long. Select the menu item View → Nonprinting Characters. Do your paragraphs near the end of the document end with a ¶? That character is created with the Enter key. If you are in the habit of using Shift + Enter, your paragraphs will end with a bent arrow. That does not count as the end of a paragraph in OpenOffice and there is a limit on paragraph length.
Thank you FJCC for your reply.
I'm not very savy on these software programs but I am learning.
My documents have a blank line between paragraphs. I just use the Enter key to put the blank space in there between one paragraph and the next.
As for ODF,etc, I started using the Rich Text instead of the ODF.
My documents are very quick to load up even the 250 page. I had used another free software but it took about 30 minutes to load up and that was when the there' was around 200 pages.

Thanks again.
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Zizi64
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Re: Can Only Type Documents Up To 250 Pages.

Post by Zizi64 »

I had used another free software but it took about 30 minutes to load up and that was when the there' was around 200 pages.
The long loading time shows you: there is some issue in the structure of the document, or in your PC.
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Re: Can Only Type Documents Up To 250 Pages.

Post by RoryOF »

I have, for test purposes, made and edited documents of over 60,000 pages in various versions of OO. Just now, to confirm, I have opened and edited one of my test documents, a 28730 page document. One would not regularly edit such a document - the edit speed is too slow, but it is quite stable. (running on a 10 year old computer with 8 GB RAM)

I suggest you save in .odt format and forget about .rtf. If you _must_ use .rtf, it may be better to break your file into smaller units, but you could have problems with the consistency of formatting.
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RoryOF
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Re: Can Only Type Documents Up To 250 Pages.

Post by RoryOF »

I have just now opened and edited another test document of 61779 pages (~18 million words). I was able to make Find and Replace edits - quite fast - and ordinary individual insert/delete edits. Also formatting style changes. Much more responsive on current versions of OO than on earlier tests (early versions of OO 3).
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Re: Can Only Type Documents Up To 250 Pages.

Post by John_Ha »

Denv12 wrote:As for ODF,etc, I started using the Rich Text instead of the ODF.
Do not do that - you are asking for trouble. See [Tutorial] Differences between Writer and MS Word files for why you should always work in and save files as .odt.

1. Create a new empty document by File > New > Text document
2. Pull in the document by Insert > From File.
3. Save the new document as a .odt file.

There may be a limit on .rtf file sizes - Word can only open files smaller than 512 MB. How big is your .rtf file?

My test .odt large file has 360,000 words on 1,156 A4 pages and is 16 MBytes with images. It opens in seconds and saves in 18 seconds. AOO hanged for ages when I saved it as a .rtf file and the rtf file was 543 MBytes. When I attempted to open the saved .rtf file AOO had hanged for five or six minutes before finally opening the file.
 Edit: I repeated the test by removing the three 2,848 x 2,136 pixel photo images and adding text so I had six times as much text. The file now has 2.2 million words and 6,734 pages. As a .odt it opens in 34 seconds and saves in 74 seconds and the .odt file is 5.4 MB.

Saving as a .rtf file took about two minutes and the file was 64 MB. This disparity (64 MB compared with 543 MB for the much smaller file, but with images) suggests that .rtf files handle images very poorly.

I therefore created a new empty document and inserted one 2,848 x 2,136 pixel photo which was 1.5 MB as a jpg file. When I saved the document as a .odt file it was, as expected, 1.56 MB. But when I saved it as a .rtf file the .rtf file was an astonishing 75 MB!

I then inserted the same image into MS WordPad and saved the file as a .rtf. The saved file was now only (!) 36 MB which is still enormous.

My conclusions are therefore that a) .rtf files handle photos (jpg images) very badly and b) there is something different? wrong? with the way in which AOO writes photo images to rtf files which causes them to be much larger than expected. 
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Re: Can Only Type Documents Up To 250 Pages.

Post by John_Ha »

See Document file size increases with EMF, PNG, GIF, or JPEG graphics in Word which says:
When you save a Microsoft Word document that contains an EMF, PNG, GIF, or JPEG graphic as a different file format (for example, Word 6.0/95 (.doc) or Rich Text Format (.rtf)), the file size of the document may dramatically increase.

For example, a Microsoft Word 2000 document that contains a JPEG graphic that is saved as a Word 2000 document may have a file size of 45,568 bytes (44.5KB). However, when you save this file as Word 6.0/95 (.doc) or as Rich Text Format (.rtf), the file size may grow to 1,289,728 bytes (1.22MB).

CAUSE

This functionality is by design in Microsoft Word.

If an EMF, a PNG, a GIF, or a JPEG graphic is inserted into a Word document, when the document is saved, two copies of the graphic are saved in the document. Graphics are saved in the applicable EMF, PNG, GIF, or JPEG format and are also converted to WMF (Windows Metafile) format.
Stay well clear of .rtf files!
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See the Writer Guide, the Writer FAQ, the Writer Tutorials and Writer for students.

Remember: Always save your Writer files as .odt files. - see here for the many reasons why.
Denv12
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Re: Can Only Type Documents Up To 250 Pages.

Post by Denv12 »

John_Ha wrote:See Document file size increases with EMF, PNG, GIF, or JPEG graphics in Word which says:
u].
Stay well clear of .rtf files!
Thank you John_Ha. All my documents are now odt. Thats back to the way it was when I installed openoffice. I wont use.rtf again.

Chris.
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RoryOF
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Re: [Solved] Can Only Type Documents Up To 250 Pages.

Post by RoryOF »

One piece of advice: when you close OpenOffice, use the formal computer shut down procedure and wait a few seconds for all disk activity to cease before pulling the power plug or closing the laptop lid. This is to allow the internal buffers of the hard drives be written to disk. Failure to do this can cause document loss, often irretrievable.
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Denv12
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Re: [Solved] Can Only Type Documents Up To 250 Pages.

Post by Denv12 »

RoryOF wrote:One piece of advice: when you close OpenOffice, use the formal computer shut down procedure and wait a few seconds for all disk activity to cease before pulling the power plug or closing the laptop lid. This is to allow the internal buffers of the hard drives be written to disk. Failure to do this can cause document loss, often irretrievable.
Hi RoryOF. Thank you for that advice. I understand the procedure.
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Denv12
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Can Only Type Documents Up To 270 Pages now.

Post by Denv12 »

This is an update to my original post. Back then I could only get to 250 pages. Now that I've changed a setting or 2 so I now use ODT files instead of the rich text.

Here's the update. Today I got my 250 page document up to 270 pages,thats a 20 page improvement. It just wont allow me to increase that page amount any further. What do I do now? I dont know whether to uninstall openoffice then reinstall it. Or,change another setting. I just dont know what setting to change. I'm lost. This problems isnt solved because I'm only better off by anther 20 pages and thats as far as it can go. Thanks for understanding.
I dont really want to split the document into maybe 3 pieces.I need to leave it as it is.
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RoryOF
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Re: [Solved] Can Only Type Documents Up To 250 Pages.

Post by RoryOF »

You shouldn't have to split your document. Turn on /View /non printing characters. This will show you how paragraphs are terminated. If they have a backwards P ( a Pilcrow), this is correct, generated by pressing Enter. If they have a left pointing hooked arrow, a line break, this is caused by using Shift Enter in place of Enter.

Often users use Shift Enter to terminate a line or paragraph (a hangover from some old word processor habits). These Shift Enters do not read in OO as paragraph ends, and the text is read as one giant paragraph. For internal reasons, OO has a 64k character paragraph limit and gets very slow and troublesome after that, refusing further entry. Normally that is about a 15 page limit.

It is possible that your document has one or more such giant paragraphs which cause the problem you are experiencing. /View /Non printing characters allows one to inspect this formatting. If you find it, there are speedy ways to solve the difficulty, so don't despair. Otherwise, if you can post the document to a file sharing site or send it to a volunteer privately, we could diagnose and suggest a solution.

None of the settings on the screens you post will be of any help.

When you open /File /Properties : Statistics tab, how many characters does it say?

I'm going offline now. Back some time tomorrow.
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Denv12
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Re: [Solved] Can Only Type Documents Up To 250 Pages.

Post by Denv12 »

RoryOF wrote: When you open /File /Properties : Statistics tab, how many characters does it say?

I'm going offline now. Back some time tomorrow.
I thought I better upload the photo of it. Thanks for helping. Its a document for now hoping it might become a book.
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RoryOF
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Re: [Solved] Can Only Type Documents Up To 250 Pages.

Post by RoryOF »

The problem is definitely something within your file - possibly use of Shift Enter rather than Enter; Are you using OO's Sections? (usually no need for these).
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RoryOF
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Re: [Solved] Can Only Type Documents Up To 250 Pages.

Post by RoryOF »

Doing what I now suggest should solve the problem, but it will not tell us for certain what the problem was.

/Edit /Find and Replace
in Find box enter \n
in Replace box enter \n
drop "More Options" and select "Regular Expressions".

Press the "Replace all" button.
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Re: [Solved] Can Only Type Documents Up To 250 Pages.

Post by RoryOF »

Was your document composed entirely using OpenOffice on your computer, or did you bring forward a section of it from another computer? Or are there large inserts from the Internet or other documents?
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